The present invention relates to the field of information technology, including, more particularly, to systems and techniques for archiving and mining health information messages exchanged among healthcare systems.
Data mining is the process of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information. The patterns, associations, or relationships among data can provide knowledge of historical patterns and future trends.
Hospitals and other healthcare organizations typically have many different computer systems used for everything from patient registration to billing to patient tracking to ordering tests. Communication among these computer systems involves a vast amount of information exchange.
It is desirable to archive and mine this information because it can provide insights such as the spread of infectious diseases, health issues of a patient, the health of a population, correlations between treatments and results, and much more.